Clone vs Sysprep vs ??? Making a copy of a VM

[Kelemvor]

So we have Windows 8.1 at work but have a few people that still need access to Windows 7 to support some older software. I've installed VirtualBox and got a Windows 7 machine going. Spent half a day getting the hundreds of patches installed so it's all nice and updated now and I just need to make a copy of the VM so I can put it on each user's machine so they can all have a Windows 7 VM.

I plan to install VirtualBox on each person's machine that needs it and then just need to get them a generic version of my VM. I'd like to have each VM have a machine name with the user's ID so was thinking I could just run sysprep and set it to OOBE, Generalize, Shutdown and then export or clone or whatever, that VM file and copy it over to the other computers.

Will that work or is there a preferred way of accomplishing this other than that?

Thanks!!

[mpack]

SysPrep then Clone should work fine.

[Rootman]

SysPrep then Clone should work fine.

Yep, I've done this a lot. I know it should be obvious but be sure to keep back a "gold" VM image that NEVER gets run so that the sysprep mini setup never gets "used" . COPY the VMs from it to your hosts keeping the "gold" version safe for further deployment. I actually treat the VM as a hardware PC, I make an image of the drive using a backup util (I use Symantec Ghost) and keep a compressed copy of the backup on a central server, I then whip up a VM on the host, mount a Windows PE disk I have and pull the image off the server. It just makes it simpler for me.

You can use quite a few imaging utils, I started using Macrium Reflect at home. It has a PE generator with it. I also picked up a Winbuilder script and added it to my home brew PE as well.